Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Hi friends! Thanks for giving me time to breathe and catch up after the most amazing weekend. We spent all day yesterday soaking it all in and reflecting on all the fun we had and how lucky we are.

I have a selection of sneak peak photos from our amazing photographer, Sarah Cramer Shields of Cramer Photo. My hope is to tell you a little bit about the weekend festivities before and after the wedding over the next few days and go into a more detail about the ceremony and reception when we’re on our honeymoon in two weeks and I have many more photos to share!

I don’t know where to begin, so I suppose I’ll start from the beginning, going back to Friday. My sister and her family as well as my parents arrived to town. I was nervous with anticipation up to that moment and once they arrived, I was able to relax a bit more.

On Friday night I hosted a cocktail party so our immediate families could mingle. This is the only photo I have – the flowers I bought for the table that afternoon! I had a spread of appetizers and drinks for everyone and we had pizza for dinner later that night.

Saturday morning we did last minute organizing, and I went on a fast run with my brother-in-law Matt. Then we walked downtown for lunch at Brasserie Saison.

The cousins had a great time making each other laugh!

On Saturday afternoon we caravanned out to Thomas’s parents’ house for a rehearsal and party.

T’s mom had heavy hors d’oeuvres catered by Laura Fonner (the chef at Duners!), and everything was amazing. Her cheese board was incredible, and she made a pimento cheese spinach + artichoke dip that was out of this world!

Merriment was had by all

T has the best group of guys!

And so do I : )

Our moms love each other too and couldn’t stop smiling.

On Saturday night we went out with a group to the Fitzroy. A bunch of friends came by to celebrate! I sipped this cocktail, but I didn’t have much or stay out too late so I could get my beauty rest.

(Shout out to Dave and Maggie, who reported they discuss our blog posts over dinner! Ha!)

I said goodbye to Thomas, who was staying with a friend downtown and made my way home to bed. It was sad saying goodbye, but we didn’t want to see each other until I walked down the aisle, so we knew it’s what we had to do.

The next day was magical, and I can’t wait to tell you more about it! One thing’s for sure: we had the most epic weather all weekend, and I could not be more thankful for that!

Thank you so much for your support and interest in my latest passion of keto as we finally arrive at the official release date of The Keto Reset Diet—today,October 3rd. The response to my assorted ruminations about keto over the past several months has been overwhelming. A brief mention here on September 14th about joining our Keto Reset Facebook group resulted in 1,000 people joining within hours! There are now over 6,600 people engaged in lively discussion at this time. The “join group” requests blew up the phone of our Facebook group host, senior writer/researcher, and resident keto recipe and lifestyle queen Dr. Lindsay Taylor. She spearheaded the recipe and 21-day meal plan projects for The Keto Reset Diet. You’ll get to know her quickly on the highly active Facebook group.

But today I want to celebrate the release and share with you one of my favorite excerpts from the book as well as a video conversation I think you’ll enjoy.

By the way, if you haven’t purchased the book yet, we have decided to extend the “pre-order” offer of four digital bonus items indefinitely for MDA readers: a $10 gift certificate to PrimalBlueprint.com, a Keto Recipe eBook, a complete eBook version of my popular Healthy Sauces, Dressings and Toppings, and an exclusive hour-long talk show with co-author Brad Kearns and myself getting deep into the keto konversation. These items are worth more than the book price, so hopefully it’s enough to get you to take action and start your Keto Reset journey.

Today I’m sharing a passage from Chapter 3 that talks about the immediate fat loss potential of keto eating and the long-term advantages of being keto-adapted. It’s part of an extensive section that discusses the broad health, performance and disease protection benefits of keto. My publisher actually advised me to not “give away” the book, but I explained that these are my peeps at MDA, so a family who shares together stays together. See what you think and, as always, I look forward to your comments.

Enjoy this excerpt from The Keto Reset Diet, and please attribute if you decide to share this content on your blog or social platforms.

Perhaps the most immediate and dramatic benefit of ketogenic eating is the opportunity for quick and efficient reduction of excess body fat and easy, long-term maintenance of your ideal body composition. Ketogenic eating stabilizes appetite hormones, up regulates the metabolic processes that prioritize fat burning, and delivers a high satiety factor owing to the high fat composition of keto-friendly meals and snacks. Ketogenic eating can make you an efficient fat-burning machine. When you are in full-blown keto, you enjoy complete dietary satisfaction, rarely feel hungry (even if you skip meals!), and never have to struggle, suffer, restrict calories, or force strenuous workouts in order to burn extra calories. Instead, you allow your genetic setting as a fat-burning beast to naturally calibrate you to a healthy body composition. You will be able to properly utilize tools like Intermittent Fasting, nutritional ketosis, and ketone supplements to drop excess body fat whenever you want, without a struggle or a second thought.

While it’s a literal truth—the law of thermodynamics—that you must burn more calories than you store to lose excess body fat, the secret is not burning extra calories through exercise while painstakingly restricting dietary calories. It’s been scientifically validated that calories burned during exercise lead to a corresponding increase in appetite and a decrease in general physical activity. These dynamics are especially true for the chronic exercise patterns that desperate dieters engage in. The secret to reducing excess body fat is in hormone optimization—being a fat- and ketone-burner instead of a carbohydrate- or sugar-burner. When you eat keto, you correct the wildly excessive insulin production that is endemic to the Standard American Diet, since fat becomes your readily available fuel source around the clock.

In contrast, a high insulin–producing eating pattern shuts off fat burning and forces you to rely on ingested calories as your primary energy source. It starts disastrously with breakfast, the “most important meal of the day . . . to not screw up,” says Dr. Cate Shanahan. At your highfalutin corporate retreat at the Ritz-Carlton, your “Healthy Start” breakfast buffet features fresh berries, low-fat Greek yogurt, homemade granola, low-fat banana-nut bread with apple butter, raisin bran muffins, steel-cut Irish oatmeal (with brown sugar, raisins, and pecans), orange or cranberry juice, and coffee. If you are conscientious and serve yourself moderate portions, you’ll still consume at least 100 grams of carbohydrates and possibly up to 200 grams—more than our ancestors might have consumed over several days. And you’ll be out 36 bucks. Seriously.

You’ll burn some of this energy off right away (generating inflammation and free radicals in the process), then prompt a flood of insulin into your bloodstream to store as fat (in the form of triglycerides) any excess glucose that you don’t burn right away. When insulin removes glucose from your bloodstream in the hours after your Healthy Start, you will become lethargic and start to feel hungry for lunch. You’ll have another high-carbohydrate binge (yes, binge; because low blood sugar triggers a fight-or-flight reaction that causes you to overeat and your hormones to more likely direct those extra calories into storage as fat—all to protect you from the perceived life-or-death matter of low blood sugar). When you repeat this high-carbohydrate, high insulin–producing eating pattern day after day for the rest of your life, you’ll contribute to the statistic that the average American gains 1.5 pounds (2/3 kilo) of body fat (and loses a half pound (1/3 kilo) of muscle each year from the ages of 25 to 55. If you fast or eat a keto-aligned meal for breakfast, none of this story happens. Instead, you sail along burning the clean fuels of fat (either from a meal or from storage), ketones, and an optimally minimal amount of glucose.

Fully Understanding the Keto Message

That’s the excerpt from Chapter 3, but please understand it’s only an excerpt. To fully appreciate the keto message and the health benefits of keto, it’s essential to adopt a big picture perspective. Case in point: another section in the book is titled, “The Keto Reset Diet is Not a Shortcut Program!” You cannot just jump into a keto eating pattern and expect the aforementioned benefits to accrue. When you cut carbs too abruptly or fail to integrate complementary lifestyle practices such as exercise, sleep, and stress management, your keto effort will likely result in the increased production of stress hormones, the conversion of lean muscle tissue into glucose to give your body the fuel source it’s grown dependent upon for decades, and eventually fatigue, poor compliance and burnout from an ill-advised effort.

Even in an enlightened group of MDA followers, our history surely includes decades of carbohydrate dependency before we saw the light and started embracing the Primal eating principles. If you have been Primal for a while, doing a great job avoiding or strictly minimizing grains and sugars, but still carry around some unwanted body fat, or have adverse blood values, or struggle with thyroid or adrenal irregularities, you likely have some level of metabolic damage and lingering carbohydrate dependency.

This is where the Keto Reset journey becomes an extremely attractive option. Go through the entire process (21-Day Reset, fine-tuning period, and six-week nutritional ketosis period) at least once, and you will experience a reset effect at the genetic level that will benefit you for the rest of your life. An annual six-week Keto Reset exercise is also a highly recommended health practice to hone your metabolic flexibility, protect against today’s epidemic of diet-related disease, and promote peak cognitive and physical performance. Even a lean, fit, athletic person will benefit from an annual Reset, whether or not they decide to adhere to nutritional ketosis over the long-term.

On the topic of extending the benefits of that annual Reset, I sat down with co-author Brad Kearns to talk about the health benefits of fasting in the big picture of keto-adaptation. In this video, we cover everything from dirty burning glucose and clean burning fat and ketones, the concept of metabolic efficiency, the contrast between overfeeding/accelerated cell division and metabolic efficiency/improved cellular repair, and all the good stuff that’s happening in your body when you ditch carbohydrate dependency and progress toward being fat- and keto-adapted.

As you likely realize, keto is incredibly hot right now, and with this attention comes lots of healthy debate—and even controversy. I’m encouraged to notice that virtually every concept presented in the book is free from objection by the thought leaders in the keto game. Even my crusty contrarian friend Richard Nikoley gives my message a stamp of approval—hard-earned praise indeed! The Keto Reset Diet presents a sensible approach that is flexible, customizable, and driven strongly by personal preference and self-experimentation. Regardless of your particulars, I’m confident the journey will appeal to you and deliver a great benefit to your long-term health.

Thank you so much for your interest and commentary. I appreciate the comments below the post and also welcome you to join the Keto Reset group on Facebook for long-term engagement.

Autumn is my favorite time of year. I may get a few eye rolls saying that, but it’s true. My spirit just comes alive in Fall. The intense California heat is behind us, the weather is still… Read more →

30 Day Guide to the Paleo Diet

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